How we ranked the best colleges in America

Business Insider just released its 2016 ranking of the
best colleges in America. This year, we adopted a
new methodology that put less weight glamour
statistics, like reputation and selectivity, and more
emphasis on hard measures that demonstrate a school's
efficacy. Here's how we put together the
ranking.

We started with the Department of
Education, gathering hundreds of the most recent data points
reported by several thousand colleges from across the
country. We keyed on the following metrics, with points
awarded for each:

2 points — Median earnings of students
working and not enrolled 10 years after entry

2 points — Median earnings of students working
and not enrolled 6 years after entry

3 points — Graduation rate within four years

1 point — Full-time retention rate in
2014

0.5 point — Average annual net cost (According
to the Department of Education, this includes "tuition and
fees, books and supplies, and living expenses, minus the
average grant/scholarship aid" and is calculated for full-time,
first-time undergrads who received aid.)

0.5 point — Percent admitted

0.5 point — Average SAT score

College years are formative for young adults, so we also
gave significant credit to schools that provide a top-notch
student life
experience, as measured by Niche, a company that compiles research
on schools. Niche assessed the social and community life of
universities and provided letter grades
based on metrics like campus quality, diversity, party scene,
student retention, safety, and athletics. We gave 2
points for a schools student life score.

Each metric was normalized by fitting values on a scale
from 0 to 1 and then multiplied by the points above. With
these metrics ranked we sifted a group of several thousand
schools down to only the 50 best.